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ADHD Drug Errors Among Kids Have Quadrupled in 20 Years
U.S. News & World Report reported:
Over 3 million American children now take medication for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but new research shows medication errors have spiked nearly 300% in the past two decades for these kids.
The increase in ADHD medication errors parallels the increase in ADHD diagnoses, said study co-author Dr. Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
The study, which researched errors reported through poison control centers from 2000 to 2021, found that about 54% of these mistakes happened when someone was accidentally given or took their medication twice.
“In the old days, we only had pills. Young kids don’t swallow pills. Now we have liquids, we have sprinkles, we have chewables,” said Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of the division of pediatrics — developmental & behavioral pediatrics at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New York City. “And so there’s a greater potential for a child to inadvertently or otherwise take a medication.”
BioNTech Wins up to $90 Million in Funding for Mpox Vaccine Development
Germany’s BioNTech (22UAy.DE) announced on Monday a partnership with a global coalition for up to $90 million in funding to support the development of mpox vaccine candidates. BioNTech would initiate an early-to-mid-stage trial for the vaccine program BNT166 to prevent mpox, a viral illness that causes skin rashes and could be transmitted to humans through physical contact.
The vaccine candidates are based on the same messenger-RNA (mRNA) technology that has been used in its COVID shots developed with partner Pfizer (PFE.N).
The trial aims to enroll 196 healthy patients with and without a prior history of known or suspected smallpox vaccination.
The partnership with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) also aims to contribute to its mission to accelerate the development of vaccines to be ready for regulatory authorization and manufacturing at scale within 100 days of recognition of pathogens with pandemic potential.
It usually takes 10-15 years to bring a vaccine to market.
New Report Shows How Much Money U.S. Government Spent on Promoting COVID Vaccine Abroad
The federal government spent nearly two billion dollars of taxpayer money on promoting COVID vaccination around the world, according to a new report from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
According to a report released on Thursday by USAID, the U.S. government spent $1.8 billion on promoting global COVID vaccination, and partnered with 120 different countries to donate 688 million COVID vaccination doses after launching “Global Vax” in December 2021.
The effort encompassed USAID, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the State Department, the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Treasury Department. The report added that government agencies were going to maintain international partnerships.
The release of the report followed comments by USAID Administrator Sammantha Power on Wednesday suggesting that countries use religious leaders to push people into getting the COVID vaccine.
“If you are trying to get people to take a COVID vaccine, you may not, in that particular community, have resources to fund a pop-up clinic, but you can engage a faith leader for free,” Power said. Power’s comments echoed the government’s domestic strategy where then National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins pushed for evangelical ministers to use their “credibility” to promote the COVID vaccine.
U.S. NIH Begins Human Trials of ‘Universal’ Flu Vaccine
The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) said on Friday that it has begun an early-stage study on its experimental vaccine targeting six strains of influenza virus.
The vaccine candidate, FluMos-v2, is designed to offer protection against four strains of the influenza A virus and two strains of influenza B virus, the health agency said.
The study is expected to enroll 24 healthy volunteers, aged between 18 and 50, who will receive two intramuscular injections of FluMos-v2 at a gap of 16 weeks, NIH said. FluMos-v2 has been designed by researchers at NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center.
COVID vaccine maker Moderna (MRNA.O) said on Wednesday its flu vaccine had generated a stronger immune response against all four A and B strains of the influenza virus compared to traditional flu shots in a late-stage trial.
The CDC Wants Your Trust Back: It’ll ‘Take Time to Rebuild.’
Mandy Cohen wants to win back America’s trust. The new CDC director spent her first two months on the job telling audiences in New York, Wisconsin and Washington state the agency has made mistakes, a mea culpa of sorts meant to show that she understands past shortcomings.
“Trust is easily broken and, as folks know, trust takes time to rebuild,” Cohen told POLITICO. “It isn’t something you can fix overnight. I know that this is a long-term way of thinking about it.”
Her trust tour, which has several more stops in the works, comes as the Biden administration begins its latest COVID-19 vaccine push and at a time when her agency faces scrutiny over its decisions and messaging during the pandemic. She is contending with a public that has, for the most part, moved beyond COVID and growing vaccine skepticism fueled by some presidential candidates and public health officials.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on Wednesday warned healthy adults under the age of 65 against taking the newly approved COVID-19 vaccine.
Pfizer Forecasts 24% COVID Vaccination Rate in U.S. This Year
Pfizer (PFE.N) expects 24% vaccination rate for COVID-19 shots in the United States this year, Chief Financial Officer David Denton said at a conference on Monday, which equates to roughly 82 million people.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized updated COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and its partner BioNTech (22UAy.DE) as well as from Moderna as the country prepares to start a fall vaccination campaign. A third vaccine from Novavax (NVAX.O) is also under review.
During the last re-vaccination campaign, when most Americans had either already had the COVID virus or been previously vaccinated, only around 56.5 million people got the updated booster shots, according to federal data.
But last week, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that about half of Americans are interested in getting an updated COVID-19 vaccine. Demand for COVID vaccines has dropped sharply since 2021, when they first became available.
‘Inverse Vaccine’ Could Help Tame Autoimmune Diseases
Vaccines rile up the immune system against pathogen invaders. But in autoimmune diseases, the immune system becomes the enemy. Scientists have now figured out a way to tamp down this self-destructive response in mice by attaching sugars to molecules that provoke immune cells. This “inverse vaccine,” reported this month in Nature Biomedical Engineering, could potentially lead to new ways to combat autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) and lupus.
“It’s a strong piece of work,” says Lawrence Steinman, a neuroimmunologist at Stanford Medicine who wasn’t connected to the study. The work, he says, offers “a cool new way” to potentially defuse self-destructive immune attacks. But Steinman and others caution that many other promising methods for taming the immune system in autoimmune diseases have faltered.
Immunologist Jane Buckner of the Benaroya Research Institute shares his mixed response to the new approach. She calls it “a good first step,” but adds that the mechanisms that produce tolerance remain poorly understood.
